The Balance
by gingersnapper
Summary: Filia worries and waits while reflecting on the changes in her life. Sometimes love is a stranger thing than we first imagine it to be. Sometimes it hurts and heals at the same time.
1. The Balance

_Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. I do not own these characters_

_AN: _

_This is a take on the X/F thing, whatever it may be. I wanted to try to explore a (pretty twisted, but I hope interesting) relationship between two non-humans with non-human emotions. I especially I wanted to explore Filia's motivations in their relationship…I understand that it is a little different take on them than most peoples'…. I only hope it is not totally without merit and that no one is offended. _

_EDIT: I re-formatted the text to hopefully make it more readable. The back and forth between thoughts and the actually evens seemed a little confusing to me, hopefully it is better now.  
_

_**The Balance**  
_

_He was late._

_And in the shadows of her modest cottage, a young mother made yet another pot of tea and waited. Dark clouds were building on the horizon, ominous and fast moving, and the first stinging drops of rain tapped against her window. Her son was asleep in bed, though the summer sky had not yet grown dark and she was left alone, waiting, with no company but memories._

_She walked to the window and saw in the darkening panes her own reflection; a tall woman stood there, un-naturally tall for a human, with thick, soft curves, buttery hair and guile-less blue eyes. Her mouth, she thought, had not always been as sensuous and pouting as it was now. It had once been innocent and pursed, before it had felt cold kisses and swollen to signal the first awakenings of lust._

_That object of lust was late. She bit her lower lip and looked down to see a tear splashing in her cold, untouched tea. She knew that there was a possibility that he was not returning, or a possibility that this was all a prank to goad her into violent emotion._

_Please, Gods, let it be the latter._

She was a creature of extremes, and she needed the chaos of those extremes manifest in her life to keep her awake and alive.

The years she had spent under the thumb of the priests of the temple had been an endless haze of boredom and depression so deep she could not recognize it for what it was. She had come alive during the Dark Star campaign, been reborn just as her son had. She had come alive with fear, with compassion, with hatred, and with love.

She had been baptized by the clash of light and dark, and her own beloved child was the fruit of that explosive union. The continual clash and break had become her sustenance and life. She depended on it.

And she depended on him. She remembered him pinching her cheek like a petulant child when he had left the week before. She remembered how his cold fingers had turned her face hot with a single touch and filled her heart with longing even as she had lashed out angrily.

She knew he didn't love her the way she loved him, but somehow it had never mattered. She knew her own love was a dark, sticky, tainted thing, a desperate convergence of lust and need and attachment. She knew that though he might not be able to love exactly as she did, she provided something that he could not live without, and that bound him to her more tightly than love.

He once told her that the extreme cycle of her emotions, both light and dark, intoxicated him to the point that he had long since depended on them to live. The belief that he would die without her provided her a rather un-holy feeling of satisfaction. It only seemed fair.

_She fingered a cookie on her plate, and considered eating it, but the single raisin winking out from the crusty oatmeal looked some how lonely and sad, and that hit much too close to home._

Her sudden and visceral attraction to him had frightened her when they had first met, but she had been a silly child, a naïve young woman with a body and soul ripe to be plucked away from the assiduously memorized ideals of her mind. And he, with an epicure's delight, had set about the plucking, not realizing that he was equally ripe for change.

She had realized quickly that her dogmatic repression at the temple had not made her truly good, but instead a pretty doll who never questioned and recited by rote. The cultivated ignorance had left her best intentions twisted. She had been taught to shun evil, to believe it only existed in the hearts of men and monsters, not knowing what lurked in the hearts of her teachers, much less in her own.

When she met him, everything shifted. He challenged her, hurt her, and she raged, and then learned. All the darkness and hatred she had bottled up in her heart she unleashed on him and he took a very sensual pleasure in it. And after the loosing of her extreme feelings, she felt purified, purged and alive.

She was like a stone in a tumbler, and he rubbed off her edges and left her smooth and sated.

She had resisted him as long as she had been able, but everyday found them drawn inexorably closer, like magnets holding themselves apart by sheer force of will. She knew he had never meant to be drawn in as she was, had thought it all a game until suddenly finding himself checkmated and bound to her more tightly than any spell or ceremony could have produced.

After months of tumbling from battle to bed they had found themselves seduced into an easy and unspoken partnership. She had never asked him to stay, but one day he simply had. He lived with her between missions from the Lord Beastmaster, and Zelas had never reprimanded him or complained. Filia knew that, despite all their denials, Mazoku could love, after a fashion, and certain could care; perhaps Zelas found some small joy in her cold heart at seeing her son content.

With Xellos had come two huge black wolves, who prowled around their yard and growled at any passerby daring to glance in. When Xellos was gone, one slept at the foot of Filia's bed, and the other kept an unsleeping watch at the door. They had frightened her at first, all claw and tooth and wicked violet eyes, but she was used to them now, and sneaked them scraps of meat under the table. They, in turn, had taken to rubbing against her legs and jutting out their shaggy heads for a scratch behind the ears. Xellos had commented distastefully that she was coddling them from Mazoku guards into lap dogs.

The townspeople had gotten used to the two strangers, although some still whispered at the strangeness of the couple. The woman was all smile and blush and full, womanly curve, a strange contrast to her companion's androgynous angularity. Some gossiped that her baby was not his, but more level heads neither commented nor cared.

Filia, still bruised from the judgment and scorn of her people, found their petty gossip mildly comforting. If that was all that they thought to accuse her with, she was relieved.

_The rain was pounding against the window, the wind howling and rattling the shutters. Still he did not come. Her face felt hot and there was a leaden weight in her gut. She had dressed for him, worn the simple white gown she knew he favored. He loved to see her in white, representing something he dually despised and craved._

She had once thought that her association with him would taint her 'purity', that sharing her bed with a monster would leave her defiled. But with knowledge and experience had come acceptance and compassion deeper than anything she could have aspired to as a priestess. Being with him left her purer, more truly good, than she had ever been.

She had once craved serenity. She now knew that serenity would leave her screaming with boredom. She needed the flashes of anger, the physical release of a thrown punch, reaching out with fist or teeth, Xellos just a few inches out of reach. If he didn't make her cry occasionally, she began to feel twisted, and would provoke him into provoking her. She would emerge refreshed and truly pure in heart and soul.

She watched how Lina and Amelia loved, and felt perverse. They longed for easy affection and adoration; she needed the snarling, bestial, yet somehow tender balance that she walked with Xellos. She needed that mutual physical desire that matched and mimicked their desperate emotional need. Perhaps it was their nature as animals to mate thus.

_A single sharp flash of lightning illuminated the hunched figure silhouetted in her doorway. Before the thunder sounded, she was at his side, strong arms catching his body as he slumped against her. His body was wracked with tremors and slick with sweat and she knew that he had stayed away from her for too long. She met his ashen-faced gaze as he whispered, "I hate you. I hate that I love you."_

_She understood. She knelt with him still clasped against her breast and laid her warm lips firmly against his cold ones, felt his tremors subside at her touch._

_"I know, darling," she said, "I hate you too."_

Fin.


	2. The Addict

**AN: Part Two, from Xellos's POV. This was much, much harder for me to write, but I hope it came out okay.**

**The Addict**

The road was dark and long and he felt strangely cold, a gnawing claw where his gut would have been, if he'd had one. The clouds were gathering heavy and pregnant and he would have given anything at that moment, power, dignity, fame, just to be finally in her doorway. He had been away too long and though it could not be helped, it humiliated him how viscerally he needed her. This last mission had been much more involved than he had anticipated.

"Or maybe," he thought wryly, "I'm just getting old."

_The first time he met her, he had been startled at how young she was; most of the Golden Dragons he had come into contact with in the past several thousand years had been seasoned warriors or venerable elders, hardened with years and training. But she had been somehow raw and refreshing in her youthful exuberance and naïveté, and her over-zealous adherence to draconian dogma only added spice to rich, troubled, tortured stew of her doubts, fears and anger. He had never tasted anything like her before. Lina's dramatic emotions provided him more than enough bread and butter, but they were plain, easy emotions, and Zelgadis's self-pity and despair tended to leave a bitter aftertaste. Filia's emotion was full and flavorful and deeply, disturbingly intoxicating. The first taste left him reeling, hungry, desperate for more. Sometimes, in a dark corner of his mind, he wished he had never taken that first, fatal sip._

She had been so pretty in the flush of her anger when he left her, all piss and vinegar, pouting lips and thrust hips. He almost told her so, to watch her boil from pique to rage. He pinched her cheek and felt her anger muddle with her desire and flow over him like a sauna.

It was the richness and depth of her anger that first fascinated him, how she could so completely and truly loathe him and still have room in her heart to loathe herself. As time wore on, he, unable to stop himself, feasted on her more and more. He loved the richness of her awakening mind, grew steadily drunker on her growing, blossoming lust

and found himself developing an acquired taste for her delicate, bittersweet love.

He had never expected to love her back.

He wished he had paid more attention to his waning strength and saved just enough to teleport to her feet, instead of trudging, like a filthy mortal, in the mud and rain. A small part of his mind reminded him mildly that were anyone else in this situation, he would find it enormously entertaining. He ignored it, and continued to wallow. As he walked, he found his mind drawn back to her again and again, equally longing and resentful. It was her fault he was thins weakened! Her fault that he needed her to survive… How could he have become bound to someone so melodramatic, so selfish, so…. _Disarming. Alluring. Sweet._

As they traveled together he had soon come to desire her and set about drawing her in. He set a thousand tiny traps for her only to find himself caught in ones she had not been aware of setting. Every seduction, every roll of the dice only drew him further in. When he finally had her, he looked around to find every fiber of his being woven together with hers.

He couldn't manage to even be remotely upset.

He ate the feelings that overwhelmed her psyche; she fed him with her excess of emotion. Their symbiosis was almost cosmically balanced, like a saprophytic orchid dually digesting and feeding its host. It seemed almost poetic that he would find someone to feed off of him as he fed off of her.

He loved the dichotomy of her, the half of her that was so truly good, so blindingly compassionate, so depressingly kind was made infinitely more palatable by the soupcon of her darker urges. He found himself delighted when she gave herself over to gluttony, stuffing her face in a rage of hunger, charmed when she allowed herself to make a catty, often quite clever remarks about friends or acquaintances.

He would never have admitted it aloud, but he loved that she could make him laugh, even when she was at her most enraged.

_He'd known he'd been lost when he found himself reporting to Zelas still chuckling over one of Filia's bitter tirades._

_Zelas had regarded him with a cold stare and a raised eyebrow._

"_What's so funny?" she'd asked, sucking on her cigarette like a teat._

"_Nothing," he'd replied, trying to choked down giggles, "Just something Filia said over tea about how Zelgadis…" He'd stopped himself in time, and Zelas had just given him a patronizing, pitying glance. Like she thought he'd been…tamed._

_Had he been?_

_It had taken him so long to have her, had he been tamed along the way?_

_He had wanted her so badly that he hungered for little else, finding any excuse to visit her, often appearing with no excuse at all, just hoping for a chance to tease her, to seduce her, finally make her his, to conquer her, so she would no longer have a hold on him._

_She'd met him one night in the foyer, when he'd returned early from a mission, and his belly ached to taste her confusion. He'd hoped to surprise her, but she'd been waiting for him, her tiny toes peeking out from the bottom of her pale, pink nightgown, her hair tied up in a loose knot._

"_You're not really dressed for a social visit," he'd managed, and since his throat felt suspiciously dry, he'd tried to turn the tables, to make her blush and retreat._

"_You should probably change or you'll give me the impression that you want to be seduced," he'd winked, expecting a tirade._

_Instead, she'd just looked at him, calmly and steadily._

"_If you're determined to seduce me," she'd said, raising her chin a little higher, "I think you'd just better come up to bed with me now. It's getting late."_

_She'd refused to be conquered, and he kept on falling._

A sudden knot of longing swept over him like the gastric flu and he pitched forward heavily onto his staff.

"Damn her," he thought and, gasping, slowly resumed his trudging walk home. They had walked this road together many times, to the market, to the lake, sometimes with Val, sometimes just the two of them. He enjoyed going to town with her, sipping the emotions she wrenched from others.

_They were much of a height, she perhaps an inch taller, although he tended to hover slightly above the ground. He had a young athlete's lanky grace, but she was all dense muscle and sleek, soft hourglass. He watched how men watched her, hungry and lustful and delighted in enflaming their jealousy. He watched how women watched her, and drank deeply from their resentment and envy. However long he stayed with her, whatever they did together, he could always count on being sated. He had begun to take pride in leaving her sated as well._

He knew she would be waiting for him, hungering for him as he hungered for her, could feel it in the back of his mind, in the hollow of his chest.

He counted his steps. _Three hundred eighty-four thousand and one, Three hundred eighty-four thousand and two…_

Her house was a dark shadow on the dark horizon, but he could feel her pulling at him, feel himself being reeled in, even as the hunger reached a painful intensity.

The rain was cold and he was shaking, but with each step to her doorway, he felt his feet grow lighter. Her light was still on and he could see her silhouetted in the window, backlit like an angel. She was wearing white, her dress falling softly over breasts and bottom, and her eyes were like beacons, calling him in from the tempest.

_Three hundred eighty-four thousand, two hundred and thirty seven, Three hundred eighty-four thousand, two hundred and thirty eight…_

He collapsed into her arms in her threshold, felt her hot, hungry lips on his and at last felt the hole in his stomach begin to fill back in.

"I hate you," he heard himself saying, "I hate that I love you."

She knelt with him clasped against her chest, kissing and nipping at his collarbone, running her fingers along the sharp lines of his face.

"I know, darling," she said, "I hate you too."


End file.
